It sounds like you went through the steps properly to get the tax credit for your spouse's income when testing to see if filing jointly would benefit you.
You could potentially combine the exclusion and foreign tax credit to see if that provides a better result., but it sounds like your best case this year may be to file separately.
Since your spouse wouldn't meet the substantial presence test and wouldn't have any US-sourced income this year, your spouse would have no return filing obligation or tax due at all.
Normally, filing jointly is beneficial when compared to filing separately - but this is really only true when comparing two spouses with a US filing obligation. Your situation is a bit unique, and may be the exception to that rule.
If you have an eligible dependent (which cannot be your nonresident alien spouse), you can file Head of Household for 2024 since your spouse didn't meet the substantial presence test.
If you would like to try to use both the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion and the Foreign Tax Credit, you will need to manually determine the "reduction in foreign taxes" to exclude the portion of the tax paid that is attributed to foreign income.
If you want to try the combination method the reduction is handled by dividing the amount of foreign exclusion taken by the total foreign income. This gives you the percentage of the foreign tax to reduce.
For example if you take the full exclusion of 126,500 on 150,000 of income where 50,000 of tax was paid it would look like this:
126,500/150,000= .843333
.843333*50,000=42,167
You'd then enter a "reduction in foreign taxes" amount of 42,167 so the maximum foreign tax considered for the credit would be $7,833 (this same number is not necessarily what the credit will work out to be.)
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